NEW YORK—A lucky chicken named Little Jerry Seinfeld was optioned to the farm, a humorous diversion that filled some of the clatter while waiting for what surely would be the classic pitching matchup of the decade.

The year, certainly. The month, at least. Yes, it would be something when the wondrous R.A. Dickey took the mound for the Mets, the sensational CC Sabathia pounded the glove for the Yankees, and the two met atop baseball’s apex. It would be gold, Jerry, gold!

Fittingly, the finale of this year's edition of the Subway Series spun in ways inconceivably odder than the way it began. The big brains of the sport had promised this would be a treat, a can’t-miss game, and sure enough, it was stuffed with all sorts of wild things that made the eyes bulge.

The wackiness started days ago, with Mets closer Frank Francisco labeling the Yankees “chickens” because of the way some batters protest balls and strikes. That led to Mets reliever Tim Byrdak dispatching a clubhouse attendant to purchase a live hen from the chopping blocks of a Chinatown market. Rushed to the clubhouse in Queens, the bird was dubbed Little Derek Jeter before Byrdak decided to name it after Kramer’s champion cockfighting rooster in the iconic sitcom Seinfeld.

Only in New York, children. Only in New York.

For a couple of days the hen lived a dog’s grand life, devouring specially made meals of oatmeal, bread and berries prepared by the Mets team chef, Theresa Corderi (who presumably has also been called upon to make her employees gourmet chicken dishes). Little Jerry resided in a cushy cage at Citi Field until late Sunday afternoon when, in one of the most magnificent pre-game spectacles in memory, the team announced that Little Jerry was being re-homed to a sanctuary upstate.

The Subway Series does tend to perk the nonsensical more than any other interleague series.

The rubber game featured Dickey, the pitcher who has carved out unprecedented excellence so late in his baseball life, tumbling on this unaccustomed stage. But just as his knee-buckling knuckleball turned wobbly, up roared the Mets’ bats, flipping a four-run deficit into a tie game before the Yankees’ Robinson Cano woke from a lazy slumber.

Cano negated his led-footed defense by crushing an eighth-inning home run off reliever Miguel Batista, the second time in three nights this scene has played out. But the Yankees’ 6-5 victory wasn’t sealed until closer Rafael Soriano, in driving rain, got pinch hitter Ike Davis to fly out—which is an improvement from how Davis spent much of the weekend, retching with food poisoning.

“It didn’t quite live up to the billing,” Dickey said of the fizzling pitcher’s duel.

A three-run shot by the exuberant Nick Swisher in the third looked for a while as if it would be all the cross-town rivals needed to quiet Dickey’s knuckleball. Where once he was virtually unhittable, on this night baseball’s most intriguing pitcher flirted with the ordinary.

Dickey’s impeccable control—so stellar for so many weeks, leading to 11 wins and a microscopic 2.00 ERA—disappeared like a fare buster jumping the turnstiles on the 7 train. Such is the fate of knuckleballers: they are as mercurial as they are rare. This is what made Dickey’s tale as a 37-year-old who had to reinvent himself such a marvel. His knuckleballs were real, and they were spectacular.

This is also what made the landing inevitable. All that he had done so well, the ground balls and the inordinate amount of strikeouts and the ridiculous command that caused pitches to seemingly halt their spin on half-orbit, all of that disappeared. Dickey hadn’t allowed an earned run in 42 2/3 innings, and his last two outings were both complete game one-hitters, but then Swisher swung into a pitch that fluttered tantalizingly high.

It was the first home run off Dickey since May 17, just one of the statistics on his side that defied both imaginations and history.

Before Swisher’s dinger gave the Yankees a 4-0 lead, Dickey had allowed a bases-loaded sacrifice fly to Mark Teixeira, and before that Dickey had delivered a pitch to Alex Rodriguez that might be considered a brushback if 75-mph knuckleballs carried such intentions.

“Sorry,” mouthed Dickey, as A-Rod twisted himself out of the pretzel position and laughed. Maybe like Elaine, A-Rod was thinking, "I'm a good dancer ... right?" Or, like the Yankees' George Costanza, A-Rod wanted to scream, "Jerk store would have smoked that guy!"

So much of the praise surrounding Dickey floats around his impeccable control, the way he throws harder than any knuckleballer in memory. Late movement on his pitches causes them to disappear and reappear like a summer fire fly, but on this night Dickey also recorded a rare wild pitch and an error charged to himself on some quirky fielding.

“All good things come to an end. It’s time to begin another streak,” said Dickey, after orchestrating an uncomfortable looking slide safely home as the Mets crept their way back, and an uncomfortable pitching line—five hits, five earned runs, three walks and three Ks across six innings—thanks to a Yankee lineup that dissects pitchers with the precision of brain surgeons.

“If you’re going to get beat, you’re going to get beat with your bread and butter. I didn’t have a great knuckleball tonight but I fought my butt off with it,” he said.

Sabathia, the pitcher with all the hardware who’s also in the midst of a terrific season, wiggled away from trouble while giving up nine hits but only one earned run across 5 2/3 innings. The Yankees finished 5-1 against their cross-city rivals this season, which might not matter in Topeka, but sure creates noise here.

“I guess just in general, not too bad for a bunch of chickens,” cracked Swisher. Yada yada yada said everyone else.

Francisco, fittingly, was placed on the 15-day disabled list Sunday so he wasn’t available to pitch, though he did have plenty to say about Little Jerry Seinfeld.

The bird was drugged, claimed Francisco. He knew this because he owns a chicken farm called Pollo Duro back home in the Dominican Republic. This bird, sniffed Francisco, was “only like 35 days old” because “they make it grow fast for money.”

Normal chickens—not the kind that complain about balls and strikes—take four to five months to get as plump as the white clucker that had pecked its way around the clubhouse carpet. But as Byrdak noted, keeping it around as a mascot wasn't feasible—who’d clean the cage on road trips?—and so a surreal transfer was arranged.

Little Jerry Seinfeld gets to spend the rest of its life at Farm Sanctuary, a 175-acre shelter in Watkins Glen, N.Y. “He avoids the fryer and the oven and everything else you can cook a chicken with,” Byrdak said.

He also promised to procure a suitable replacement, a rubber replica that “doesn't need to be fed and watered and (have its) poop cleaned up afterward.” Sometimes the sitcoms just write themselves.